An Overrepresentation of the State?

Nathan Snaza’s Animate Literacies is a long-overdue invitation to think not only about what literary texts mean but also about the dynamics of how, for whom, and why they mean. In this book, the words close reading take on multiple meanings as the author sidesteps debates of microscopic symbolic interpretation in favor of training attention on the sprawling “literacy situations . . . where intrahuman politics of race, class, gender, sexuality, and geography shape the conditions of emergence for [subjectifying] literacy events” (4). To this end, Snaza—director of the University of Richmond’s Bridge to Success Program—presents the compelling argument that we ought to “speak less of literate subjects . . . than of literacies . . . jacked into state apparatuses of control” (73). The goal of Animate Literacies, then, is made clear by the plural literacies of its title: to interrogate the ways in which modern states have...